Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. —Rainer Maria Rilke

About Me

I am currently staying at home and taking care of my children (born 6/08 and 7/10). In my little free time, I teach and write liturgy. My work is currently available through the clayfire project (sparkhouse publishing, a division of Augsburg). I teach for Fuller Seminary online. I am also very interested in the spirituality of food and how faith impacts the choices people make around eating. I am writing articles and perhaps one day a book on this topic.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Why Religion Must End

4 comments:

Feels like this guy is throwing out the baby with the bath water. He seems to be making utopian assumptions about a future of no religion. "Imagine all the people." The thing is, he is just replacing current religions with a new one. Changes in the status quo will still result in war, conflict, and people just being down-right nasty. But this is your blog, so what do you think?

I think it's really interesting that he's into meditation and other religious practices, yet claims that religion itself has got to go. He's like the poster boy for "spiritual but not religious." But in fact, to me, a lot of what makes up the heart of a religion is those sorts of practices - that's how you are formed into a certain kind of person who is recognizable as religious. The doctrines and debates are about God, but in the practices, you actually meet God.

If you're looking for God, which he clearly is not. But I wouldn't put it past God to show up and surprise him.

What athiests seem to not get is that atheism is a belief system. It's the belief that if you can't prove it, it doesn't exist. And science has over and over again proved that wrong - there are lots of things that we couldn't prove existed 50 or 100 years ago that we take for granted now. No, it's not an organized religion, but it is as much a belief system as theism is. Being agnostic ("I don't know") is different than being an atheist.

He has a point, in that it is true that organized religion, particularly of the conservative or fundamentalist sort, is an excuse for all sorts of awful human behavior. But religion is not the only origin of bad human behavior. Stalin and Mao, and the governments and societies that they created, and that have caused all sorts of trouble, shows to me that it really doesn't matter what your religious point of view is. Bad behavior is bad behavior.